Combat Expertise

[Laughingmanlol]

Power attack seems to be a popular option, since the increase to damage outweighs the penalty to accuracy. The calculator can show it increases the damage per round
Combat expertise, however, seems very unpopular, since the increase to defence is equal to the penalty in accuracy. I haven't run the numbers, but it seems the only time it would be worth using would be against opponents who are making more attacks each turn than you.
My question is, would combat expertise be more useful if its effect was closer to the reverse of power attack - namely, if the penalty to hit you take gives you equal damage reduction until the next round? Alternatively, what if it became the complete inverse, where you take a penalty to AC for the reduction in damage taken?
In short, would making combat expertise improve DR rather than AC make it a more useful feat?

[eggynack]

I'm not sure, but I suspect it'd be a bit more useful, depending on the type of DR. Still, that wouldn't make it useful. Combat expertise is a feat which trades offense for defense in a game where you pretty much always want to be trading defense for offense. It's just a bad move in a vast quantity of situations. If you really want to not be hit, you're generally better off trying to kill the opponent before they can get a counter attack.

[sleepyphoenixx]

Also of note is that damage is damage. AC (or DR) is just one kind of defense, and one that a lot of enemies can ignore.
It's situational at best and not very strong. Power Attack works against pretty much everything (save a few "trick" monsters) and has amazing synergy with stuff like Leap Attack, charging etc.

[Emperor Tippy]

Combat Expertise is decent if you have a good idea what the monsters AB actually is. Trading, say, 10 points of damage from every attack to ensure that you enemy will only hit on a natural 1 is well worth it. It's much less worth it to trade and find out later that your opponent's AB was upwards of 20 points more than your AC.

If your opponent is 19 to 2 points in AB above your AC than each +1 to your AC is a 5% reduction in being hit but outside of that 18 point range AC is pretty much totally worthless.

[Chronos]

In short, would making combat expertise improve DR rather than AC make it a more useful feat?
There's already something similar: Stone Power, from Tome of Battle, lets you trade attack bonus for temporary HP that last one round. It's sometimes taken by crusaders and other tanky types.

And the other problem with Combat Expertise is that it's capped at 5, no matter what your BAB. There's another feat that removes that cap, but you really shouldn't have to pay two feats for that.

[ericgrau]

Power attack seems to be a popular option, since the increase to damage outweighs the penalty to accuracy.

It doesn't, it tends to be break even or a loss. At low levels you get a very small gain (which might be what you are seeing on the calculator before including any magic weapon & class feature & etc. damage). But it isn't any better than weapon specialization at low level, and WS remains useful into high level. But what people do is pull tricks to remove the penalty and then suddenly bam it's 5-10 times better than weapon specialization. This is what pretty much every high optimization THF build does.



The calculator can show it increases the damage per round
Combat expertise, however, seems very unpopular, since the increase to defence is equal to the penalty in accuracy.

The increase to defence tends to exceed the penalty to accuracy. The problem is not every enemy uses AC attacks so that makes discussing it fuzzy.



I haven't run the numbers, but it seems the only time it would be worth using would be against opponents who are making more attacks each turn than you.

I have (on CE and PA), and actually if all your foes are using AC attacks and your sum of attack bonus + AC is greater than theirs, you should always max out combat expertise. For this reason unoptimized CE annihilates unoptimized PA in a duel, because the foe is making AC attacks and he dumped his attack bonus. Against monsters or other classes it isn't always as hot, because their attacks might not hit AC. Which is the general problem with specific defenses.



My question is, would combat expertise be more useful if its effect was closer to the reverse of power attack - namely, if the penalty to hit you take gives you equal damage reduction until the next round? Alternatively, what if it became the complete inverse, where you take a penalty to AC for the reduction in damage taken?
In short, would making combat expertise improve DR rather than AC make it a more useful feat?
1 point of DR is usually worse than 1 point of AC. More points of DR might be worth it. Perhaps 2:1 similar to PA. But even then it would have similar issues to PA: ok at low level and often useless at high level, unless you pull tricks. You might make the ratio scale with level. Though DR still doesn't help against special attacks, the kind that target saves or such.

You could also create feats which improve CE into boosting saves and SR, but then it runs the risk of making no sense without a ton of fluff work.

[Fax Celestis]

FWIW, you can get a better trade off of Combat Expertise for damage than Power Attack under certain conditions: Deadly Defense gives you +1d6 damage if you're using Combat Expertise for at least -2, averaging -2 for +3.5, better than if you're using Power Attack with a one-handed weapon (like if you're sword-and-boarding), close to par with a two-handed weapon (barring extra feat spending), and it's usable with a light weapon or with a Weapon-Finesse-centric combat style.

Yes, if you're going to be dumping more into PA, you'll get better damage returns out of it, but Combat Expertise + Deadly Defense is combat-style independent and can be used by someone with a terrible STR score.

It also synergizes very well with the Scout's Riposte ACF (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20070228a).

[Laughingmanlol]

Thanks, your responses have been very interesting and enlightening!

[Chronos]

Quoth Fax:

...close to par with a two-handed weapon (barring extra feat spending)
Not a fair comparison, because you're using two feats on CE and only one on PA.

[Fax Celestis]

Not a fair comparison, because you're using two feats on CE and only one on PA.

True enough.

[Dusk Eclipse]

You can make Combat Expertise be useful with (relative) little investment (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=178445)

[sleepyphoenixx]

Or as useful as AC gets anyway. The problem is that most classes have enough ways to raise AC and other feats they'd rather spend their limited slots on.